Happy Jubilee week everybody! Jubilations, actually, I suppose, isn’t it? Props to her maj anyway, as I believe the young folk probably aren’t quite saying these days.

But – without wishing to detract in any way from Elizabeth Twoth’s great achievement, we must not forget a quieter but equally pleasing and almost as terribly British anniversary. For it was 70 years ago that the first Famous Five book was published. I wish I had to look up the title, but I can still recite all 21 of the eventual series in order, so firmly were they engraved on my eight-year-old mind – it’s Five On A Treasure Island. If unswerving Britishness is the theme of the day, then we can hardly do better than doff a cap in the direction of Enid Blyton’s sterling work.

All of a very particular band of human life is here, and in the other 800 or so books she published in her lifetime by dint of writing between 6,000 and 10,000 words a day for over 40 years. There was Uncle Quentin and Aunt Fanny; four children – alpha male Julian, dickless Dick - little Anne, proto-feminist/Sapphic role model George – and Timmy the dog; solid yeoman stock who doled out victuals from their farmhouse kitchens and a nation of shopkeepers who dispensed lashings of ginger beer; Kirrin Island, a mini-British empire complete with castle, rabbits and bracken for beds (even old colonials need their sleep); and there were villains – thwarted of course, at the last. As one critic famously put it: “What hope have a band of desperate men against four children?”

Therein, of course, lies the secret of Blyton’s lasting appeal. Her books were simple, formulaic and comforting. You knew – even before you had read them for the second, third, 100th or 200th time – what you were going to get. It’s hard not to see her as holding the hands of thousands of post-war children literally and metaphorically dislocated by their experiences. And in microcosm her books have allowed individual children to bridge the scary gap between young children’s books and full-length fiction ever since.

Lucy Mangan on the Famous Five